Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 20 of 24

Dawn came, and with it the smell. Celeste opened her shutters and gagged. Six pirate corpses lay on her dock where the Barons had dropped them. The heat had already started its work. Flies hung thick above the bodies. She leaned on her cane and studied the mess. The Barons had drunk the spirits, but the flesh remained. Rot would draw swamp scavengers by nightfall, and scavengers drew worse. Anyone hunting her would smell the killing from the water. She could not bury six men alone before dark. She had one mouth already fed and always hungry. In a wide clay pot beside the bench grew her carnivorous bloom. Its fanged petals hung open above a nest of thick, twisting stems. She had raised it on poison and spirits, and it had swallowed a pirate captain whole once. Since then it had eaten only marsh rats. Now it turned its huge bloom toward the dock, sensing the meat. The stems flexed against the pot's rim, dripping. "You want them," Celeste said. "Then earn your keep." She dragged the pot to the doorway. The plant strained toward the corpses, but its roots held it to the pot. So she cut a length of ghost-silver wire from her bench and looped it around the base of the bloom. Then she set her hand on the totem and reached for the three weakest spirits inside. She fed them down the wire into the plant's stems. The bloom shuddered. Its leaves stiffened. The stems lifted from the pot like arms and hauled the whole plant onto the dock boards. The bloom fell on the first corpse. Fanged petals closed over the man's chest and pulled. Celeste heard bone crack. The plant dragged the body into its throat and swallowed. It moved to the next. She stood in the doorway and guided it with small pushes through the wire, one corpse at a time. The stems worked fast now, greedy. By midmorning four bodies were gone. The bloom swelled, its stems fat and glossy. The fifth corpse nearly stopped it. The plant strained and gagged. Celeste twisted the valve on the totem and pushed more spirit-force down the wire. The bloom gulped the body down. It took the sixth slowly, sated and swollen. When the last boot vanished into the throat, the dock stood empty. Only dark stains marked the wood. Celeste threw a bucket of lake water across them. The smell was gone. No corpses, no evidence, no scavengers coming. She hauled the heavy plant back to its pot and cut the wire. The bloom drooped, full and quiet. But she saw the truth as she wiped her hands. She had fed the Barons on blood, and now she had fed the plant on flesh. Every tool she owned hungered. To bind all the dead of Everblack, she would keep feeding them, and each mouth she fed grew a wider throat.